The lawyer for Sattar Beheshti’s family claims the main perpetrator of the blogger’s death is an interrogations officer at the Ministry of Intelligence and she criticized the judiciary for delaying the proceedings.
In an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Giti Pourfazel said the judiciary is creating undue delay in the case to “buy time” and let the scandalous nature of the affair subside.
Sattar Beheshti, who ran a blog containing critical views of the government, was arrested by the cyber police and pronounced dead five days later. Other prisoners who saw him there claim Beheshti was seriously tortured and feared for his life when he was last taken for questioning.
A probe into his death by the authorities has established the cause of death as “fear and anxiety from prison conditions” and “psychological pressures.” Even so, says Pourfazel, the interrogators must be held responsible for those psychological pressures.
The family has filed a suit against prison authorities, but so far the file remains in limbo.
Giti Pourfazel has said that she has written directly to president-elect Hassan Rohani, urging him to make every effort to expedite proceedings in the Beheshti case so that justice may be served.
